

■ishif^ S'^- 





I 






0?/?/ 

6^^ 










The 
American Revolution 



and 



The Boer War 



The American Revolution 

and 

The Boer War 



An Open Letter to 
Mr. Charles Francis Adams 
on his Pamphlet 
"The Confederacy and the Transvaal" 



/ " »>. *.• 

\0 f. 



By , ^yt' 

SYDNEY G. FISHER 

^ Author of " Men, Women and Manners in Colonial Times " 
/^/'^^ "The Evolution of the Constitution" 

1y "The True Benjamin Franklin, "etc. 



(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Sunday Times 
of January 19, 1902) 



/- 



27 F '02 



'b 



'h 



■■3 



^ <X^' 



Philadelphia, January 14, 1902. 

Charles Francis Adams, Esq., 

Boston, Massachusetts. 

Dear Sir: 

I have been handed a pamphlet written by you entitled 
"The Confederacy and the Transvaal," the burden of which 
is, that the Boers ought not to continue their irregular gue- 
rilla struggle against England, because it is destructive of 
themselves and wasteful of England's resources; or to use 
your own words "the contest drags wearily along, to the 
probable destruction of one of the combatants, to the great 
loss of the other, and, so far as can be seen, in utter disre- 
gard of the best interests of both." 

You argue that the Boers, when their regular armies 
were defeated some considerable time ago, should have sur- 
rendered, given up the struggle, and not have resorted to a 
prolongation of the contest by guerilla methods. In sup- 
port of this you cite the action of General Lee at the close 
of our civil war, when, his regularly organized army being 
completely defeated, he surrendered it, went quietly to his 
home and set an example, followed by the other southern 
leaders, of not prolonging the strife by those irregular meth- 
ods which, as is well known, can be so very effective for a 
long period in a mountainous country like Switzerland or in 
a country of vast distances like the United States or South 
Africa. 

In other words, you go so far as to say that when a 
people are fighting for their political integrity and independ- 
ence, a hopeless struggle for it ought not to be prolonged 
beyond what may be called the point of scientific defeat. 
Rather than prolong it to desperation and death in the last 
ditch it is much better and more sensible to accept a depend- 
ent position of some sort, the position of a crown colony, or 
a charter colony with more or less varying degrees of colo- 
nial control, all of which your very unwise and altogether 
reckless great grandfather John Adams, and some of his 
friends used to describe as "political slavery." 



This doctrine of the wrongfulness of a struggle for 
independence against overwhelming odds has appeared at 
times of late in the newspapers. I noticed that Mr. Bourke 
Cockran in his speech at the recent pro-Boer meeting in 
Chicago said, that the doctrine did not apply to the Boers 
because their heroism had now placed them in a position to 
win. He did not say positively whether or not he approved 
of such a doctrine. I am myself willing to pass by a great 
deal of approval of it. But when the attempt is made to 
render such an infamous doctrine respectable by affixing to 
it the honored name of Adams, a protest is in order from all 
those who are at all familiar with our own history. 

I do not believe that our American people when their 
attention is really brought to the matter believe in any such 
doctrine. But their attention is not usually brought to it. 
We have been by our stupendous power far removed for a 
long time from the possibility of such a struggle. We are 
accustomed to the business method of settling serious dis- 
putes by yielding at once to overwhelming power ; by acqui- 
escing in the vote of the majority or the will of the richer 
man or clique that has bought up all the stock. When the 
political boss informs our corporation that the legislation we 
want passed must be paid for we pay without resorting to 
guerilla or any other tactics. When one holds the cards that 
will take all the remaining tricks he usually shows his hand 
saying, "the rest are mine," and everybody assents. 

But circumstances alter cases and all cases are not alike. 
If your doctrine is of universal application the ravisher who 
presents himself with overwhelming force must always be 
gently accepted without resistance to save time and avoid 
danger and expense. If the European powers, disgusted 
with the success of our protective tariff and rising commer- 
cial supremacy, should unite to abolish our lynch law, burn- 
ing of negroes at the stake, municipal corruption and some 
other matters, their armies and fleets would outnumber us 
even more than the English outnumber the Boers; and I 
suppose if you are really as much of a "quitter" as you 
profess to be you would then still preach your doctrine of 
submission. 



5 

When you look closely at the matter and try to fix the 
point of scientific defeat in the Boer war I do not know why 
you should place it at the fall of Pretoria or whatever 
moment you decide upon for the defeat of the regularly 
organized armies. I should say it was just as well placed 
before the fighting began when England showed her cards ; a 
population of 30,000,000, withotit counting the population 
of the colonies, against a population that does not number 
2,000,000 counting the Cape Colony rebels ; an army of 
250,000 regulars against 40,000 militia. 

If 3'our doctrine is sound political morality, it applied 
then, and in the face of such stupendous odds, I should say, 
rather more than it does now. 

But I prefer to be guided somewhat in these matters by 
your great grandfather, John Adams, for whom I have 
always had a great fancy. If you will pardon me for saying 
so I think that his attention was more closely and intensely 
directed to these matters than yours has ever been. His 
neck was at stake as Avell as your own valuable existence 
and reputation. The British statute of that time provided 
a terrible punishment for what he was doing. Possibly 3''0U 
have never read it. 

"That the offender be drawn to the gallows, and not be carried 
or walk; that he be hanged by the neck, and then cut down alive; 
that his entrails be taken and burnt while he is yet alive ; that his head 
be cut off; that his body be divided into four parts; that his head and 
quarters be at the king's disposal." 

The disposal the king was accustomed to make of the 
heads and quarters of such people was to have the quarters, 
hung about in conspicuous parts of London like quarters of 
beef; and the heads were set up on poles on Temple Bar or 
London Bridge to rot as a ghastly warning. 

I am inclined to think that the opinion of a man who 
from 1765 to 1780 worked with that enactment hanging 
over his head is worth considering. I find on picking up the 
first life of him that comes to hand, that he was anything 
but blind to the consequences. England had shown her 
hand. She outnumbered the colonists four to one; and, 
in the same proportion, she could send a disciplined army 
against their undisciplined militia and guerilla forces. 



It was even worse than that. The colonists were not 
■united in resisting England ; not nearl)^ so unanimous as the 
Boers are. It was by no means certain that our colonial 
rebel party had a bare majority. The loyalists insisted and 
believed that they themselves had the majority. So if we 
.cut off from the supposed 3,000,000 population of the colo- 
nies the black slaves who' numbered abovtt 800,000 and the 
loyalists who were even more numerous, we had at the 
utmost only about 1,400,000 whites who were prepared to 
resist the army, fleet, and 8,000,000 population of England 
without counting nearly a million loyalists in their own 
midst. 

In fact on the showing of hands it was an utterly hope- 
less contest, and within a few years proved itself to be such. 
All that saved yovn" ancestor's party from complete annihila- 
tion was the assistance after 1778 of the French army, fleet, 
provisions, clothes and loans of money followed by assist- 
ance from Spain, and at the last moment by the alliance of 
Holland. And even with all this assistance your ancestor's 
■cause was even as late as the year 1780 generally believed 
to be a hopeless one. 

Your ancestor did not like the prospect. He was fully 
prepared for misery, beggary and his family blood attainted 
and rendered ipfamous to the last generation by the English 
3aw. Death was the least thing he dreaded. 

"I go mourning in my heart all the day long," he writes to his wife, 
■"'though I say nothing. I am melancholy for the public and anxious 
for my family. As for myself a frock and trousers, a hoe and a spade 
would do for my remaining days." 

'"I feel unutterable anxiety," he writes again. "God grant us wis- 
-dom and fortitude ! Should the opposition be suppressed, should this 
country submit, what infamy, what ruin, God forbid ! Death in any 
form is less terrible." 

"There is one ugly reflection," he says in a letter to Joseph Warren, 
""Brutus and Cassius were conquered and slain, Hampden died in the 
.field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail. This is cold com- 
fort." (Morse's Adams, pp. 54, 60.) 

Your ancestor had still other difficulties to face of 
which it may be well to remind you. Long before actual 
•fighting began in our revolution the rebel party, or perhaps 
I should say, the rougher elements of it, created by means of 



tar and feathers and other methods, a reign of terror 
throughout the whole country. They went about in parties 
taking weapons of all kinds out of loyalists' houses, al- 
though they have since put a clause in the National and all 
state constitutions that "the right to keep and bear arms- 
shall never be infringed." Those documents also without 
exception, I believe, contain a clause guaranteeing freedom 
of speech and of the press ; but the rebel party of your 
ancestor extinguished completely and utterly both of these 
rights ; so completely that Rivington, the principal publisher 
of loyalist pamphlets, fled for his life to a British man-of- 
war; and loyalists scarcely dared refer to politics even 
indirectly in private letters. 

If the loyalists were really a majority, as they professed 
to be, the rebels were determined to break them up. Loyal- 
ists were ridden and tossed on fence rails, gagged and bound 
for days at a time, stoned, fastened in rooms with a fire and 
the chimney stopped on top, advertised as public enemies so 
that they would be cut off from all dealings with their neigh- 
bors ; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses 
poisoned or mutilated; money or valuable plate extorted 
from them to save them from violence and on pretence of 
taking security for their good behavior; their houses and 
ships were burnt; they were compelled to pay the guards 
who watched them in their houses; and when carted about 
for the mob to stare at and abuse they were compelled to 
pay something at every town. For the three months of 
July, August and September of the year 1774, one can find 
in the American Archives alone, over thirty descriptions of 
outrages of this kind. 

In short, lynch law prevailed for many years during 
the revolution, and the habit became so fixed that we have 
never given it tip. As has been recently shown the term 
lynch law originated during the revolution and was taken 
from the name of the brother of the man who founded 
Lynchburgh in Virginia. 

The revolution was not by any means the pretty social 
event that the ladies of the so-called patriotic societies sup- 
pose it to have been. It was on the contrary a rank and 



8 

i"iotous rebellion against the long- established authority of 
a nation which had saved us from France, built us up into 
prosperity and if she were ruling us to-day would, I am 
entirely willing- to admit, abolish lynch law, negro burning, 
municipal and state legislative corruption and all the other 
evils about which reformers fret. 

But feeling that we were a naturally separated people, 
the rebel party among us insisted that we had the inalienable 
right to rule ourselves. We were seized with the spirit of 
independence, or as the people of your way of thinking at 
that time called it "a chimera of patriotism." Against this 
natural and inalienable right no authority, Ave declared, no 
matter how meritorious and venerable need be respected. 

The Boers, though receiving far greater provocation 
than we received, have behaved much better. They have 
not tarred and feathered Englishmen as we did or ridden 
them on rails, or suffocated them with smoke, or burnt their 
houses or hazed or tortured them in any way. Their con- 
duct in the whole war has been most fair, honorable and 
meritorious, showing the high character of their intelligence 
and morals and their superiority to the British. 

In our revolution, wherever the rebel party were most 
successful with their reign of terror they drove all the 
judges from the bench and abolished the courts; and for a 
long time there were no courts or public administration of 
the law in many of the colonies, notably in New England. ■ 

To people of the loyalist turn of mind all these lynching 
proceedings were an irrefragable proof, not only that the 
rebel party were wicked, but that their ideas of independence, 
of a cotmtry free from British control and British law, were 
ridiculous, silly delusions, dangerous to all good order and 
civilization. That such people could tvev govern a country 
of their own and have in it that thing they were howling so 
much about, "lilDerty," was in their opinion beyond the 
iDOunds of intelligent belief. 

These lynching proceedings, the loyalists said, increased 
the loyalist party very fast and made them sure of a major- 
ity. I shall not discuss that question. But there is no 
doulDt that many rebels went over to the loyalist side; and 



many others who did not actually go over were shaken in 
their faith and hardly knew^ what to think. Your ancestor 
belonged to the party who did all this lynching and in- 
augurated the reign of terror and he has himself told us how 
it staggered him. The prospect of raising such men as the 
lynchers to power by a revolution was a serious matter. A 
man one day congratulated him on the anarchy, the mob 
violence, the insults to judges, the closing of the courts and 
the tar and feathers which the patriots and their congress 
were producing. 

"Oh Mr. Adams, what great things have you and your colleagues 
done for us ! We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no 
courts of justice now in this province, and I hope there never will be 
another." 

For once in his life your ancestor could not reply. 

"Is this the object for which I have been contending, said I to 
myself; for I rode along without any answer to this wretch. Are these 
the sentiments of such people, and how many of them are there in the 
country? Half the nation for what I know; for half the nation are 
debtors, if not more; and these have been in all countries the senti- 
ments of debtors. If the power of the country should get into such 
hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we 
sacrificed our time, health and everything else?" (Works of John 
Adams, Vol. ii, p. 420.) 

I have made these lengthy statements and quotations 
for the sake of reminding you that the man who was re- 
sponsible for your existence and also very largely for the 
existence of the revolution, faced with his eyes open the very 
state of affairs which you say should in conscience and good 
morals compel a man to surrender and give up. He faced 
a far worse state of affairs than the Boers face, and he had 
less excuse for his conduct. 

He, however, did not follow your advice; and one 
reason may have been that his wife, whose blood is also in 
your veins, would have despised him if he had. I need not 
quote those beautiful letters of hers which are in print, in 
which she declares not only her own unalterable affection, 
but her willingness, to go down with him to disaster and 
poverty and labor with her hands. Among all the men of 
that time I do not know of one who was more uncompromis- 
ing, more obstinate, more determined as President Kruger 



lO 

put it, to make Great Britain "pay a price that would stagger 
humanity," or according to your own theory, more immoral, 
than your own great grandfather and his wife. 

During the seven years fighting of tlie revolution Great 
Britain sent out peace commissioners and kept offering terms 
which steadily increased in liberality, entire freedom from 
taxation, in fact almost everything the rebel colonists had 
demanded, up even to a sort of semi-independence. Your 
great grandfather voted down everyone of them. He 
attended with Franklin the famous peace meeting with Lord 
Howe on Staten Island and rejected Lord Howe's terms. 
And why ? Because none of them contained the one essen- 
tial condition, absolute independence. Your great grand- 
father was a Kruger. 

But let us pass from him. Let us see what others 
thought and what was the general situation during the revo- 
lution. 

At the very beginning of that contest our forces were 
of an irregular and guerilla character. The farmers, who 
attacked the British regulars at Lexington and followed 
them back to Boston picking them off from behind stone 
fences and trees, were the most irregular fighters it is pos- 
sible to imagine. They were not acting under the authority 
of any legitimate or even a de facto government. They 
were not even officered, directed or authorized by the rebel 
Continental Congress, which had met the year before in 
Philadelphia. They were acting in a purely voluntary man- 
ner in obedience to a mere sentiment of that faction of the 
colonists who resented an invasion from Great Britain and 
wanted this country for their own. They were acting in the 
same manner and on the same sentiment by which the Boers 
now act and which you say is a crime. 

It is very important to remember that the moral posi- 
tion of the Boers is vastly stronger than was ours. Before 
the present Boer war began the Boers were two independent 
nations whose independence had been acknowledged by 
England on two or three different occasions and in two or 
three different documents. We were not independent and 
never had been. We were colonies and some of our com- 



1 1 

munities were not even charter colonies ; they were crown 
colonies ; and one of the charter colonies, Pennsylvania, had 
a clause in its charter acknowledging the right of parliament 
to tax as it pleased. Our revolution was an out and out 
rebellion against legitimate control because we wanted to 
govern ourselves ; because we did not want to be governed by 
people who lived three thousand miles away in another and 
far separated country ; because we did not want to be taxed 
by the outsider; because we did not want him to maintain 
an army amongst us to keep us in order, because we did 
not want him to regulate our commerce or om- manufactur- 
ing industries; because in short, we wanted to keep house 
for ourselves and believed that the colonial position was at 
its best essentially a degradation to manhood or as we called 
it at that time "political slavery." If the Boers are wrong- 
in defending against England by guerilla methods an inde- 
pendence long since acknowledged, then we were ten thous- 
and times wrong in supporting by the same methods a rebel- 
lion for' independence against that same country which it 
is said can rule any people better than those people can rule 
themselves. 

The Boers at the beginning of the present war had the 
regularly organized armies of an independent nation. With 
the money obtained from the gold mines they had bought 
the most modern artillery, small arms and ammunition. We 
on the other hand being mere rebels had none of these 
things. Our guns were at first antiquated or blacksmith- 
made muskets and shot guns; and we were the ridicule of 
the British regulars because we had no bayonets. When- 
ever we had a chance we used the superior weapons taken 
from British prisoners just as the Boers now use the Lee- 
Metford rifles taken from their prisoners. We never were 
decently armed until France sent us shiploads of guns and 
ammunition. Many of the straps and cartouche boxes worn 
by our people had the British army letters G. R. stamped on 
them. Graydon relates in his memoirs how when he was 
taken prisoner a cartouche box with those letters on it was 
instantly wrenched with violence off his person. 



12 

As our first meeting in arms with the British was 
irregular so was our second. Bunker Hill was so much of a 
guerilla battle so far as we were concerned that it is dis- 
puted to this day whether Putnam or Prescott was in com- 
mand. As a matter of fact there was nobody in particular 
in command. It was a voluntary sort of affair; and the 
description of it reads exactly like a Boer battle. 

About fifteen hundred men, mostly farmers like the 
Boers, suddenly seized an important hill or kopje danger- 
ously close to the British lines. They fortified themselves 
with breast works made of fence rails and hay in such a 
bucolic manner that all the regulars in Boston laughed. 
They could have been defeated very easily by sending a 
force on their flank and rear. But General Gage thought 
that would be ridiculous and unnecessary. A force of three 
thousand regulars could easily by a front attack sweep off 
these farmers, show them the uselessness of their methods, 
and possibly end the rebellion at once. 

You know the rest. But it must be very shocking to a 
person of your views to remember that the old Queen Anne 
muskets, shot guns and duck guns which your forefathers 
in such bad taste and contrary to all military science, levelled 
over those fence rails and hay at your friends the British in 
beautiful uniforms, were loaded with buckshot, slugs, old 
nails, and bits of iron from the blacksmith shops. That 
was our Majuba Hill, our Spion Kop. 

Let us move along still farther. The New England 
farmers for all the rest of the svtmmer, autumn and follow- 
ing winter formed themselves into a most vulgar and absurd 
army and surrounded Boston, shutting in the British. The 
minds of those farmers were full almost to fanaticism of 
the principle of equality and the rights of man, "the level- 
ling principles" as they were then called which now form 
the foundation of our American life. The officers among 
them were merely leaders and persuaders. It was not an 
uncommon sight to see a colonel shaving one of his own 
men. The men served a few weeks and then went home 
to get in the hay or see how their wives were getting on, 
and others came from the farms to take their places. In tbis 



13 

way the army was kept up. Those who went home were 
very apt to take their powder and musket with them to shoot 
squirrels on the farm. 

A year later at New York our army was the same gue- 
rilla force and I shall let Captain Graydon describe it : 

"The appearance of things was not much calculated to excite san- 
guine expectations in the mind, of a sober observer. Great numbers of 
people were indeed to be seen and those who are not accustomed to the 
sight of bodies under arms are always prone to exaggerate them. But 
the propensity to swell the mass, has not an equal tendency to convert 
it into soldiery; and the irregularity, want of discipline, bad arms, and 
defective equipment in all respects, of this multitudinous assemblage, 
gave no favorable impression of its prowess. The materials of which 
the eastern battalions were composed, were apparently the same as 
those of which I had seen so unpromising a specimen at Lake George. 
I speak particularly of the officers who were in no single respect dis- 
tinguishable from the men, other than in the colored cockades, which 
for this very purpose had been prescribed in general orders ; a different 
color being assigned to the officers of each grade. So far from aiming 
at a deportment which might raise them above their privates and thence 
prompt them to due respect and obedience to their commands, the object 
was, by humility, to preserve the existing blessing of equality, an 
illustrious instance of which was given by Colonel Putnam, the chief 
engineer of the army, and no less a personage than the nephew of the 
major-general of that name. 'What,' says a person meeting him one 
day with a piece of meat in his hand, 'carrying home your rations your- 
self, colonel !' 'Yes,' says he, 'and I do it to set the officers a good 
example.' " 

(Graydon's Memoirs, edition of 1846, p. 147.) 

We have grown into a habit of depicting all our revolu- 
tionary forefathers, both privates and officers, in beautiful 
buff and blue uniform as if we were from the start a regu- 
larly organized, independent nation, fighting regular battles 
with another independent nation. There were, I believe, at 
times a select few, more usually officers, who succeeded in 
having such a uniform. But the great mass of our rebel 
troops had no uniforms at all. They wore a hunting shirt 
or smock frock which was merely a cheap cotton shirt belted 
round the waist and with the ends hanging outside over the 
hips instead of being tucked into the trousers. Into the 
loose bosom of this garment above the belt could be stuffed 
bread, pork, and all sorts of articles including a frying pan. 

We of course do not like to have a picture of one of 
our ancestors painted in such a garment. It would not look 



14 

well. It is better to have some theoretical uniform, the uni- 
form that our fathers would have had if they had had the 
money and time to get one, painted on top of a picture of our 
ancestor. 

Lafayette has described in his memoirs the rebel army 
he found in this country on his arrival in the svunmer of 
1777: 

"Eleven thousand men, but tolerably armed and still worse clad,, 
presented a singular spectacle in their parti-colored and often naked 
state ; the best dresses were hunting shirts of brown linen. Their tac- 
tics were equally irregular. They were arranged without regard to size 
except that the smallest men were the front rank." 

When the French officers appeared among us after the 

alliance, our officers were often unable to entertain them for 

lack of decent clothes and food. Washington in an order 

of July 24, 1776, said: 

"The general, sensible of the difficulty and expense of providing 
clothes of almost any kind for the troops, feels an unwillingness to rec- 
ommend, much more to order any kind of uniform ; but as it is 
absolutely necessary that men should have clothes and appear decent 
and tight, he earnestly encourages the use of hunting shirts with long 
breeches made of the same cloth, gaiter fashion about the legs to all 
those yet unprovided." (Force 5th Series, Vol i, pp. 676, 677.) 

That was the sort of army Washington commanded; 
an army to which he could seldom give orders but only rec- 
ommendations and suggestions. It often melted away before 
his eyes without any 4)Ower on his part to stop desertion. 
At New York in 1776 he collected as you know by the 
utmost exertion about 18,000 men, but so afflicted with camp 
fevers and disease that only 14.000 of them were effective, 
and these were more of a rabble than an army. At the 
battle of Long Island and other engagements round New 
York they were easily beaten by General Howe's huge army 
of 34,000, and as is generally believed could have been 
annihilated or exterminated if that general had chosen to do 
so. As it was they were so broken up and scattered that 
they disappeared to their homes, and Washington fled across 
New Jersey and crossed the Delaware with only 3,300 men. 

The Continental Congress fled from Philadelphia. It 
was a migrating congress for many a day afterwards; 



15 

travelling from one place of refuge to another with its little 
printing press and papers carried in a wagon. 

If you had been living in those days you would have 
said that the rebellion had now certainly reached the point 
of scientific defeat and should be abandoned and all hope of 
independence given up. Thousands of people at that time 
said so. The loyalists of course said so ; and many who 
had been rebels, or had been watching to see if the rebellion 
had any chance at all, now turned against it and took the 
British oath of allegiance. That is tmquestionably what 
you would have done if you had been living at that time 
with your present opinions. Your great grandfather how- 
ever was not of that mind, nor was Washington. 

In fact, Washington prepared to become the worst kind 
of a guerilla; and you will find his letter on the subject in 
the second volume of Irving's life of him, chapter XLI. In 
case of being further pressed he said, "We must then retire 
to Augusta county, in Virginia. Numbers will repair to us 
for safety and we will then try a predatory war. If over- 
powered we must cross the Allegheny mountains." 

What do you think of that? What a wicked man he 
must have been. He intended to abandon the seaboard 
colonies, taking with him all the rebels who would follow 
him ; and a great many includingyour ancestor would have to 
follow him, for if they remained behind they would be hung. 
He proposed a "grand trek" to get away from those British 
who are said to govern so well, just as the Boers "treked" 
away from them into the deserts of South Africa nearly a 
hundred years ag-o, because they did not fancy what they 
had experienced of that supposed excellent government. 

Having secured a refuge for the rebel congress and 
his followers on the edge of what was then the Western 
Wilderness, Washington proposes to maintain himself there 
by what he calls "predatory war," and I suppose you know 
what that is. If unsuccessful in that, he intended to cross 
the Allegheny mountains and plunge into that vast unknown 
region with the Indians and the buffaloes, which stretched 
away 3,000 miles to the Pacific ocean. There, assisted by the 
great distances he could play havoc with an invading British 



i6 

force; cut their slender communications and their cordons 
of blockhouses as the Boers are doing to-day in South 
Africa. 

This last resort of the rebel colonists was so obvious 
that it was often discussed not only in the colonies but in 
England. It was greatly feared by the tory ministry, 
because it might indefinitely prolong the war. The whigs 
prophesied disaster from it; and Burke in one of his speeches 
refers to it in an eloquent passage in which he describes the 
rebel colonists retreating to that vast interior of fertile 
plains Avhere they would grow into marvels of hardihood 
and desperation ; how they would become myriads of Amer- 
ican Tartars and pour down a fierce and irresistible cavalry 
upon the narrow strip of sea coast, sweeping before them 
"your governors, your councillors, your collectors and 
comptrollers and all the slaves that adhere to them." 

In other words the tories dreaded what not so very 
long afterwards they accomplished in South Africa. They 
forced the Boers out of Cape Colony and they went by the 
grand trek into the interior plains where they founded two 
fierce and free republics, such as Washington might very 
readily have founded west of the AUeghenies. A turn of 
the hand, the failure of the French Alliance might have 
placed the United States in a position somewhat similar to 
that of South Africa or to that of Ireland if you like. The 
effect of British brutal and stupid violence on a high strung 
and independence-loving people will always be very much 
the same everywhere. 

But to return to Washington's letter. You very likely 
read it when as a young man you read Irving's life of him ; 
but it never occurred to you to think that his "predatory" 
and guerilla war was wicked. It was on your side; you 
believed that his desire for the independence of the country 
was just and right, and being so, could be rightfully sup- 
ported by predatory as well as regular warfare. Your 
youthful instinct Avas sound. You had not then learned 
to worship mere financeering. You had not then imbibed a 
passion for that part of the British constitution which 
declares that any resistance whether in support of independ-^ 



17 

ence, home or anything else which interferes with the opera- 
tions of a financial clique in London is a crime. 

But when you see the principles and tactics of Wash- 
ington and your own great grandfather repeated in a coun- 
try far off they seem different, and when you see them 
turned against a country which gradually has come to 
embody in your mind fashionable society, you think them 
very dreadful. From your great grandfather's time to yours 
is a very short distance in history but a long distance, it 
seems, in political morals. 

The proposition for which you contend, or for which 
you profess to contend, for I decline to believe that anyone 
of your name really accepts such stuff, is nothing but the old 
principle of the bully and brute. The little man must yield 
where his case is shown to be hopeless and save the brute's 
time and money. After every battle of the revolution the 
British and the loyalists thought that your ancestor and his 
friends ought to give it up, and this went on for over seven 
years in spite of the assistance of France. 

I am inclined to think that if you were really put to the 
test you would not live up to your own principles. I am 
inclined to think that if I and several others, outnumbering 
you in the proportion of the English to the Boers, should 
present revolvers and say that being men of better business 
capacity we would now kindly take charge of your private 
affairs and manage them for you to your great advantage, 
you Avould not act quite as piously as you preach. The one 
or two drops of the blood of old John, which are still hidden 
in your veins, somewhere down in your boots, would sud- 
denly loish to your heart and inflame it. You would duck 
under those revolver muzzles and come at our stomachs in 
a way that would keep us moving. We should undoubtedly 
very soon have your dead body with which to conduct 
some sort of brutal and stupid British triumph ; but we 
should never be able to say that we had made a political 
slave of a living Adams. 

I have not space here to take you all through the revo- 
lution and remind you of every scene in which your ances- 
tor figured. But I shall finish what I was saying about 



Washington when his army was reduced to 3,300 and he 
was prepared for a grand trek to the Alleghenies. He did 
not have to resort to that because General Howe did not 
press him any further. For pohtical reasons, which we can- 
not go into here, Howe preferred that Washington should 
raise another army if he could. 

Howe retired to New York and spent the winter there 
with his large force of 30,000 ; but at Trenton and Borden- 
town on the Delaware River some fifty miles away he placed 
two isolated outposts of about 1,500 Hessians each. Wash- 
ington collected more men until his 3,300 had become 6,000 
and with these raw militia he gobbled up those Hessian out- 
posts just as the Boers have been gobbling up similarly 
placed British outposts. When a force of 8,000 British 
came out from New York to reoccupy Trenton, \A'ashing- 
ton cut in behind them, and at Princeton, finding some more 
British coming up widely separated and unable to support 
one another, he beat them in detail. 

This was brilliant, irregular Boer warfare on outposts 
and weak detachments. Washington was alile to do it 
because his whole system was like that of the Boers, an 
irregular one. If he had had a regularly organized army 
and it had been reduced down to 3,300 it would never have 
been brought together again. He would have been done 
for. But his army Avas always one of the come and go 
kind. He had a small nucleus that could be relied upon to 
stay; but most of his force was composed of men who came 
from all parts of the colonies to serve three weeks, three 
months or six months then return home and have others 
come in their places. It was by this Boer method that all 
the armies of the rebel party during the revolution -were kept 
going. When seriously defeated or when they had accom- 
plished an object they would scatter as the Boers do and 
make it very difficult to destroy that which did not exist. 

Now that we have settled down and become a great 
nation all this seems like very foolish business to some of us 
who cut off coupons or sit at roll top desks endorsing the 
backs of documents until we have lost the natural feeling of 
vigorous manhood so characteristic of the Boers and the 



19 

followers of Washington. We have forgotten our revolu- 
tion. Our own acts in it now seem too heroic for our stom- 
achs when we see others practicing them. Ireland has been 
practicing sirnilar methods against England for hundreds 
of years. It may be a foolish game, but it can be made a 
very long one. It has lasted some seven hundred years in 
Ireland without success on either side. It lasted some 
thirty years in Cuba and was successful and we have set the 
,seal of our approval on that success. 

I shall now restore to your recollection the famous 
Duche letter which was written in the autumn of 1777- 
Duche was a brilliant young clergyman of the Church of 
England and was settled in Philadelphia. He was inclined 
to take sides with the rebel colonists, and would have been 
very glad to see them attain what they wished if it could 
have been done peaceably and in the manner of ordinary 
business negotiations ; and he was even willing to go a little 
farther than this and have the rebel colonists make a cer- 
tain amount of armed resistance up to a certain point, not 
iDeyond the bounds of good taste. In short he was very 
much of your professed way of thinking, and he represented 
a large class of people who were of that way of thinking. 
At the meeting of the first Continental Congress he opened 
the session with a prayer so eloquent and suitable that it 
attracted universal attention, and gave him at once a political 
■standing of some little importance. 

But after three years of Boer tactics, irregular methods, 
hopelessness, evident failure, the rise into power of men who 
v\'ere not gentlemen, petty peculation and fraud in the rebel 
army, apparent deterioration in character of the men in the 
rebel congress, the undignified runaway, wandering habit of 
that congress with its papers hauled from one refuge to 
another in a wagon, and similar things which make a deep 
impression on men of a certain kind of education and refine- 
ment, he saw so clearly the unutterable folly and wickedness 
of the attempt at independence that he could stand it no 
longer. 

There were many others who thought just as he did; 
hut they usually either went to live in England or Canada 



20 

or kept quiet in semi-concealment waiting until the power 
of Britain should restore order and good government to the 
colonies. But Duche, feeling that he was in somewhat of a 
public position, argued out the whole subject in a long letter 
to General Washington, calling on him in the name of God 
and humanity to put an end to the frightful state of affairs 
SO' mutually destructive to the best interests of both the colo- 
nies and England. 

He was horrified he said to find that rather than give up 
the idol independence the rebels "would deluge this country 
in blood." In short he was horrified at the Krugerism of 
Washington who intended to make England "pay a price 
that would stagger humanity." As to the rebel army its 
existence depended on one man. Most of its officers were 
from "the lowest of the people." "Take away those who 
surround your person, how few are there that you can ask 
to sit at your table." The rebels had hoped for aid from 
France ; but after three years of waiting it had not come and 
there were no signs of it. The whig party in England was 
growing smaller. The whole English nation, "all orders and 
ranks of men are now unanimous and determined to risk 
their all on the contest." 

"Under so many discouraging circumstances, can virtue, can honor, 
can the love of your country prompt you to persevere. Humanity itself 
(and sure I am humanity is no stranger to your breast) calls upoa 
you to desist. Your armyTnust perish for want of common necessaries, 
or thousands of innocent families must perish to support them. Where- 
ever they encamp the country must be impoverished. Wherever they 
march the troops of Britain will pursue and must complete the devasta- 
tion which America herself has begun." 

"Perhaps it may be said, 'it is better to die than to be slaves.' This 
indeed is a splendid maxim in theory; and perhaps in some instances, 
may be found experimentally true. But where there is the least proba- 
bility of a happy accommodation surely wisdom and humanity call for 
some sacrifices to be made to prevent inevitable destruction." 

It reads almost as if you had written it yourself, does- 
it not? It raised the whole question fairly and squarely, 
the whole question of the moral right of a naturally separ- 
ated people to struggle for independence to the bitter end, 
the last ditch, extermination or whatever name you choose 
to give it, or as in the case of Ireland, the Armenians and. 
the Poles without end. 



21 

I do not mean to say that that was the only time that 
Washington had had the question brought squarely before 
him. It was a question that came up all over the country 
every day for seven years down to within a few months of 
the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781 ; for the year 1780 was 
as you know the darkest hour in our revolution. Every 
individual in those seven years had that question before him 
every day and hour, and as individuals settled it for them- 
selves one way or the other they dropped in and out of the 
two sides of the contest. 

How did Washington settle it with Duche? The 
young clergyman made a powerful appeal to him. He said 
that the whole solution of the war rested with Washington 
alone. He alone could stop the fighting. He alone could 
persuade the other leaders in the name of God and human- 
ity to give up a hopeless contest. This was somewhat of 
an exaggeration. The war was deeper than Washington 
just as the Boer war is deeper than Kruger. But never 
mind that. Duche's idea was that Washington should at 
the head of his army negotiate for some settlement short of 
independence. Independence, England would never grant. 

Awful and wicked as it now no doubt seems to you, 
Washington declined this honor. He sentDuche's letter to the 
wandering congress. It was copied and given a wide pub- 
licity. Your ancestor and the men of that time never 
dodged the question raised by that letter. Washington also 
sent a copy to Duche's brother-in-law, Francis Hopkinson, 
and if you want to read a stinging letter I can recommend 
the letter Hopkinson wrote to his perverted relative. The 
whole correspondence including Duche's letter is printed in 
the appendix to the edition of 1846 of Graydon's Memoirs. 
I shall quote just one passage from Hopkinson's letter: 

"The whole force of the reasoning," lie says to Duche, "contained 
in your letter tends to this point : that virtue and honor require us to 
stand by truth, as long as it can be done with safety, but that her cause 
may be abandoned on the approach of danger ; or in other words, that 
the justice of the American cause ought to be squared by the success of 
her arms." 

The moral or principle contained in that passage is 

repudiated by you and by every one who lives in England ; 



22 

by the Russians also, most of the Germans, many French- 
men and in fact Europe generally. If you fear numbers 
you do well, no doubt, in repudiating it. But it was on that 
moral principle that our revolution was put through. Who- 
ever denies that principle denies the United States, denies 
our foundation principle and our validity, denies the justice 
and righteousness of the struggles which created Switzer- 
land, and all the South American republics including Cuba, 
struggles which are still carried on by the Armenians after 
seven hundred years of failure and by the Irish for the same 
period, struggles which in fact, originall}^ created England, 
France, Germany and all the powers which now affect to 
despise them, struggles which create nationalities and all that 
is useful, honorable or valuable in civil or political life. 
When you deny the right of a naturally separated people to 
struggle without end for independence, you den}^ the most 
fundamental and necessary, the most powerful and far 
reaching, the most scientific and well settled principle of 
moral conduct that history has disclosed. 

I do not wish to take up too much space accumulating 
instances in our revolutionary history, but Franklin's con- 
duct is perhaps worth considering. He was not what is 
called an enthusiast or fanatic. He was on the contrary 
one of the shrewd calculating kind. He had full knowledge 
of all the conditions. He resided in England as agent of 
Massachusetts and of the rebel cause in general from 1764 
to 1775. It cannot be said that he did not know the power 
and merit of England. He admired the English political 
system. He was very fond of English life and preferred a 
residence among learned and cultivated people in England 
to one in America. Under these influences he at first believed 
that the colonists should submit after trying ordinary 
peaceful and so-called legal measures. In a word Franklin 
was at first of your opinion. 

But when he returned to America in 1775 and the spirit 
or influence of independence touched him he became the 
most unrelenting, obstinate and as you would say unreason- 
ing, fanatical and blind stickler for absolute and unqualified 
independence at any price or at the price of extermination. 



23 

The Continental Congress of which your ancestor was 
a member was, as late as the year 1780, so determined to 
keep up the struggle although in that year it was reg"arded 
as hopeless, that they arranged to have pictures prepared 
with short descriptions of what they considered British 
atrocities, but which were the milk of human kindness com- 
pared with Kitchener's Spanish concentration camps and 
other benevolences inflicted on the Boers. These pictures 
and descriptions were to be shown and taught to every 
American rebel child forever so as to burn into their minds 
eternal hatred and a struggle without end against the inde- 
pendence hating British brute. 

Just at the close of the revolution Franklin was prepar- 
ing to have thirty-five of these pictures designed and 
engraved in France "in order," as he wrote to an English- 
man, "to impress the minds of children and posterity with 
a deep sense of your bloody and insatiable malice and wicked- 
ness." If Franklin could apply such adjectives to Eng- 
land's comparatively mild attempts to suppress a rebellion, 
what would he say to-day of her worse than inhuman efforts 
to destroy two independent nations. Franklin believed that 
the success of our revolution had destroyed forever the 
inherent cruelty and despotic brutishness of the English tory. 
But the tory has gone on developing; and even the English 
liberal has less of the courage, intelligence and character 
which were such a brilliant and saving grace to him in the 
days of Bt:rke, Chatham and Barre. 

I shall now consider what you say about the action of 
General Lee and the leaders of the confederacy. You 
assume that they were struggling for independence ; and that 
is most extraordinary. It is an insult, as it seems to me, to 
the intelligence of the whole American people. I never before . 
heard our civil war described in that way. That Lee 
or the confederacy were struggling for independence in the 
sense in which the American colonists of 1776, or the Boers 
of to-day or the Swiss or the Irish struggled for that object 
I most positively deny. If Lee and the confederacy had 
been struggling in that sense the civil war would not yet be 
over. The eleven southern states would be now either inde- 
pendent or in the condition of Ireland. 



24 

First of all the southern states were not a naturally 
separate people. They were contiguous territory. There 
was no natural boundary dividing them from the North. 
They were of the same race, language and social status 
as the north. They had takn part with the north in making 
the whole country independent of England and with the 
north they had made the National Constitution. 

They had quarrelled with the north simply about the 
question of slavery. At one time they had disapproved of 
slavery in the abstract as much as the north did ; but as their 
slaves were more profitable than slaves in the north they 
were slower about abolishing slavery than the north had 
been. Their slaves were guaranteed to them by the Con- 
stitution. The rising moral sentiment against slavery in 
the north, which seemed to them to threaten the abolition of 
slavery in the south by violence without regard to the Con- 
stitution and without compensation to owners drove them 
into war. Their confederacy which they formed was a 
mere make-shift to protect millions of dollars worth of 
slaves. There is no evidence of any passion for independ- 
ence among them, such as has characterized the people 
already described, and as a matter of fact there was nothing 
in their unseparated situation that would cause that pas- 
sion. 

High strung, intelligent men such as the southerners 
•are, will fight a long-time over millions of dollars worth of 
slaves, if they think they are to be suddenly and unfairly 
deprived of them, but not as they would fight for independ- 
ence, for political existence. There was so little moral 
righteousness in slavery and they had always known so well 
its unrighteousness that when the point of scientific defeat 
was reached, when their regularly organized armies were 
formally defeated they gave up the game. The inspiration 
■of the cause was not perennial. There was none of the 
eternal justness in it which inspired the cause of Washing- 
ton and your ancestor, which has kept the Cubans strug- 
gling for thirty years, and the Irish and the Armenians for 
seven hundred. 

General Lee, who, as you say, set the example of giving 



25 

up, was a man of peculiar views on the civil war. He was 
not a believer in slavery. He described it as a "moral and 
political evil" and "a greater evil to the white than to the 
colored race." He did not even believe in the right of seces- 
sion. He spoke of it as an absurdity, and said that it was 
impossible to suppose that the framers of the Constitution 
could have contemplated anything of the sort. He had 
great misgivings and much mental struggle when Virginia 
seceded and he finally decided to go with his state because as 
he put it, "I have not been able to make up my mind to raise 
my hand against my relatives, my children, my home." He 
cared little or nothing for the confederacy. It was the 
invasion of Virginia against which he fought and he always 
commanded the army in Virginia. "Save in defence of my 
native state" he said, "I hope I may never be called on to 
draw my sword." 

Such a man easily dropped the contest for the confeder- 
acy when the point of scientific defeat had been reached. 
He fought to acquit his own honor as a man fights a duel 
until blood is drawn, and that done he has no more incentive 
for fighting. 

There is also another point you have forgotten. The 
terms which General Grant offered Lee were of a liberality 
beyond the capacity of any British general or statesman. 
Lee's whole army was paroled and told to go home taking 
their horses with them to cultivate their farms. There 
were to be no punishments or executions for treason. After- 
wards when some people in the north foolishly clamored 
for punishment. Grant sternly insisted on the fulfillment of 
every condition in the surrender. Under such terms it was 
very easy and natural for Lee to ride quietly from the sur- 
render to his own home, walk in and shut the door, and 
never trouble himself about the rebellion again. 

You say Lee's example influenced the other southern 
leaders. But it was Grant's example, the fair and honorable 
terms, which were the real influence, the real power that 
was accomplishing this result. It was very American and 
possible only among Americans. The English are too 
stupidly violent ever to achieve such a result as that. 



26 

You may remember that some months ago Botha and 
some of the Boer leaders met Lord Kitchener to discuss 
terms of peace. And what were the British terms ? Com- 
pare them with Grant's. Lord Kitchener said that immun- 
ity would be given to certain of the leaders, but no immunity 
could be promised to certain others. Could honorable men 
consent to surrender themselves and escape on condition that 
certain of their associates were to be hung? 

Suppose Grant had said to Lee, "You and your officers, 
if you will surrender, shall be guaranteed immunity ; but 
Jefferson Davis, and Johnston and Beauregard are to be 
hung." Do you suppose Lee would have surrendered? I 
am inclined to think that if any such British policy had been 
carried out there would be g-uerilla war and Irish rebellion 
in the south to this hour, 

Lord Kitchener, you Avill also remember, would give 
the Boers no promise of local self-government. It was indefi- 
nitely postponed. They asked him about giving the 
right to vote to the black Kaffir population. But Kitchener 
refused to give any promise on that point. 

In other words they were asked to surrender without 
any agreement that the lives of the rebels in Cape Colony 
who had been assisting them should be spared the gallows, 
they had no definite promise of local self-government, and 
so far was the possibility of self-government removed that 
it was left uncertain whether or not the black Kaffir popula- 
tion would not be used to control them and outvote them if 
a sham of self-government were set up. 

Now let us suppose Grant offering similar terms to 
Lee. Let us suppose him saying that the eleven states of 
the confederacy would be held as crown colonies, or presi- 
dential subject colonies for an indefinite period, and that the 
north reserved the right to control the south by means of 
g-iving the vote to the recently freed black slaves and with- 
holding it from the whites. Do we not all know what 
Lee's answer and Avhat the answer of the whole south would 
have been to those terms ? 

We all know what happened a few years afterwards in 
the reconstruction period when tlie blacks were to a certain 



27 

extent put over the whites. We all know that the south 
immediately turned to ^erilla methods or as they were 
called the Ku Klux societies, societies of secret assassina- 
tion and terror, methods far worse than ordinary guerilla- 
ism. Moreover these Ku Klux methods were successful. 
They broke the dominion of the black man. They com- 
pelled the north to stop, to recall its carpet baggers, to recon- 
sider its injustice; or as Mr. Page puts it the southerners 
reconquered their own country, and had it again under their 
own normal state governments. But if Lee and the other 
southern leaders had known all this was coming they would 
have begun the guerillaism at Appomatox. 

The Ku Klux methods were unpleasant, atrocious, 
unfortunate in many ways ; for as most of us can remember, 
they fixed upon southern life the habit of assassination, 
which continued for many years in a manner most revolt- 
ing and shocking to northern moral sense and it has only 
recently begun to die out. But who was to blame? Eng- 
land has in the same way turned the Irish into assassins, 
rioters and law breakers, and then cries out that they are bar- 
barous and uncivilized and must be "coerced" and forced 
into more assassination, rioting and law breaking. I place 
the blame where it belongs; and I venture to predict 
that if England continues her inhuman, morally degrading- 
and worse than Irish policy with the Boers she will turn 
them into a race of assassins or law breakers. They are now 
the very reverse of that. They have shown a higher regard 
for the sacredness of human life than we have to-day in 
America. They have shown more self-restraint, more 
respect for personal rights, have dealt more fairly with their 
opponents than we did in our revolution. They are the 
superiors of both ourselves and the English and they are 
inferior to us and the English only in numbers. 

There is a great deal of talk of England's success in 
ruling dependencies. She rules no doubt successfully 
enough over the servile, over toadies, flunkeys and weaklings 
or those who have no spirit or love of independence. 
Wherever she has attempted to rule an independence-loving 
people as in the case of the Irish, ourselves or the Boers, 



28 

she has made a most shocking failure of it. Few people 
trouble themselves to read the long history of England's 
dealings with the South Africans for nearly a hundred years 
previous to the present war. It is all detailed in Theal's 
admirable volumes of the history of South Africa. Theal 
was himself an Englishman, an official in South Africa, 
and he prints all documents in full. I must confess I was 
astonished to read this long record of atrocious injustice, 
inhumanity, stupidity and cruelty which generation after 
generation has hammered the Boers into a separate people, 
given them a long list of martyrs and anniversaries of feroc- 
ity and built up in them a fell hatred of the English, which 
now astonishes men like yourself, who suppose this to be 
a mere sudden outbreak, and who have not the time, or will 
not take the trouble, to investigate the long chain of causes 
which led up to it. 

With an independence loving people England has only 
two methods of success, extermination or banishment. 
She always rules with complete success over the dead. 
When with Martinis and Lee Metfords she has slaughtered 
over 27,000 black or brown men, carrying spears or old- 
fashioned guns, with a loss on her side of only 387, and 
with a vast crop of medals and Victoria crosses for the sup- 
posed heroes of this supposed wonderful victory, she has 
unquestionably solved a "problem" in her way. 

When, after 700 years of conquests, '"colonization," 
reform bills, final settlements, coercion acts, land acts, hang- 
ings, confiscations, corruptions, treachery and broken prom- 
ises, a large part of the native Irish are living in the United 
States, where by their steadiness, industry, bright minds 
and success they contradict and disprove every charge and 
statement made against them by pottering English states- 
men, England may undoubtedly be said to have successfully 
solved the problem of her "white man's burden" so far as 
concerns these Irish in the United States. 

As to those who remain in Ireland we again hear of 
coercion, are told that there is to be some more legislation for 
them which is to be a "final settlement." An Englishman 
has just written a book to prove that all settlements with 



29 

such people as the Boers and the Irish should be "finalities" 
and settle the question. This, he says, is very important. 

I notice also that some Irish representatives arrived 
the other day in New York to collect from Irish-Americans 
subscriptions in money to enable them tO' discuss this "final 
settlement," which has been progressing for 700 years with- 
out arousing the least sense of humor in any Englishman 
whom I ever knew or heard of. 

I know however of one settlement which is supposed to 
have been final. It was a document signed in Paris in the 
year 1783, by an Englishman whose name is of no im- 
portance, but the persons who signed on the other side were 
Franklin, Adams and Jay. I am wrong to call this a final 
settlement. It gave us only independence on the land. 
England still ruled us on the ocean where she searched 
our ships as she pleased and claimed a suzerainty over us as 
she has claimed a suzerainty over the Boers, and for the 
same contemptible purpose, to enable her to watch her 
chance to destroy our independence. 

We remained semi-independent imtil 181 2 when we 
fought what used to be called the Second War for Inde- 
pendence. There were a great many people in your part of 
the country who thought we ought not to fight that war. 
They used your argument. They said what is the use? 
It will waste money and destroy valuable property, both 
English and American. What is the use of fighting for a 
mere sentiment? Let us be governed by sense rather than 
sentiment. Let us be content with the substantial advantage 
and the liberty we already have rather than risk it all, and 
our material interests besides. And you carried this argu- 
ment so far that you threatened to secede from the Union. 

England had secret emissaries here at that time to en- 
courage secession and dissolution in the hope that at any rate 
she could turn New England and possibly the Middle States 
into dependencies again. A few years afterwards in our 
Civil War, she again did her vitmost to dismember us ; and 
she would to-day seize with eagerness any similar opportun- 
ity. She never gives up her purpose to destroy the political 
tnanhood of any people. 



30 

If she had the courage of her convictions and intentions 
and was not afraid of the outcry of the civihzed world, she 
would be much shorter and quicker in her work with the 
Boers. She would surround the concentration camps of 
Boer women and children with machine guns and pump into 
the mass of humanity vmtil that heroic race was extinct. 
But she prefers the safer and more veiled, but equally in- 
famous, method of slow starvation and disease, of banish- 
ment and imprisonment in distant countries to extinguish a 
race which she hates because she knows she has always done 
them evil and wrong and because they excel her own people 
in morals, military intelligence and courage. 

She hated our love of independence as she hated Ire- 
land's and it was merely an accident that she did not make 
of us an Ireland. When she deals with an independence- 
loving people she makes of them either an Ireland or a 
United States. And that is the question in South Africa. 
Shall there be an Ireland in South Africa or a United States 
of South Africa? 

It is most dismal to read of Englishmen suggesting for 
the Boers the same old methods that were used in Ireland, 
"colonization," stamping out the native language, stamping 
out the love of independence, banishment, depriving of 
weapons, the greatest severity, no mercy. The Irish were 
deprived of their weapons, even of their shot guns. They 
were forbidden to have carving knives above a certain length 
or horses above a certain value. They were "colonized" 
and their lands taken away from them and given to English- 
men over and over again, in exactly the same manner that 
Cecil Rhoads now recommends for the Boers. Measures to 
exterminate their language and their Roman Catholic re- 
ligion were taken over and over again and were of such re- 
lentless severity that no reasonable man could doubt that 
both the language and the religion would disappear within 
a g-eneration. 

Cromwell went among them with scythes, bullets and 
Bibles and the war cry of his soldiers was "Jesus and no 
quarter."' The town of Drogheda surrendered to him on his 
promise that their lives should be spared. 



31 

"But no sooner had they laid down their arms than Cromwell took 
■back his word and slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city, 
so that five days are said to have been spent in this ghastly massacre. 
At Wexford the same miserable scenes of treachery and butchery were 
•enacted." (Gregg's Irish History, p. 64.) 

Very few educated people in this country read Irish 
history. It is a sort of forbidden subject. It might re- 
veal too much. From what I have read of it I am free to 
say that for stupid injustice, blind, unreasoning', brutal 
cruelty, treachery and corruption on the part of England 
from about the middle of the 12th century down to to-night 
it equals if it does not exceed in atrocity the rule of the Span- 
iard in South America. 

Yet all the wicked things that the atrocity was in- 
tended to exterminate are still alive and possibly stronger 
than they were in the twelfth century. Roman Catholicism 
is as strong as ever, the language still lives, and there has 
been a special revival of it within the last two years. The 
most wonderful part of all is that the Irishman is still alive, 
still an Irishman with children and grandchildren. He still 
loves his country, still loves independence and home rule, is 
still carrying on what you call guerilla tactics ; and this very 
summer made a special outburst of guerillaism in the British 
parliament itself in the very heart of London. 

What does all this show ? Simply that the spirit of in- 
dependence, the natural nation- forming instinct of human 
beings, when once aroused, is usually inextinguishable ex- 
cept by the annihilation of every individual ; and that this is 
a provision of nature for the formation of human societies 
in the world. Secondly that men will fight longer and more 
desperately for justice or against injustice than they will 
fight for money. 

It has been the consciousness of eternal justice that has 
kept the Irish and Armenians going for seven hundred years, 
that inspired the Netherlands to resist the Spaniard for 
eighty years, that kept your ancestor fighting for seven years 
and determined Washington to resort to "predatory" war 
rather than yield to the "benevolence and good government'' 
of England. 



32 

Justice is far superior to philanthropy, charity, "the 
white man's burden" or any other pious hypocrisy or fraiid 
that the villainy of man has invented. It is more important 
than, and it must precede both morals and good government. 
After you have been just to a people you may begin to preach 
to them. Good government as well as agricultiu'al, com- 
mercial and industrial prosperity, have been rendered im- 
possible in Ireland for centuries because there has been no 
justice to the native and patriotic party among the people. 
Justice can purify most of the international horrors of the 
world far better than "benevolence." 

We are on the whole more just than other nations. We 
founded ourselves upon justice, upon the doctrine that a 
naturally separated people had a right to their independence, 
that all men Avere politically equal and equal before the law, 
and that no government could be just that did not rest on the 
consent of the governed. These doctrines are the highest 
development of justice that has been wrought out in the past 
and by that great movement called the Reformation. But 
England has never accepted them. 

We have taught England many things. The dread of 
our influence compelled her to give the Canadian French 
liberal institutions. Any rights the Canadians, the Austral- 
ians or the East Indians enjoy are the result of our revolu- 
tion and the Sepoy Mutiny. Without our example the Eng- 
lish lower classes would still be serfs. Real liberty and free 
government, the rights of the laboring man, have grown dur- 
ing the last century in England out of American precept and 
example. 

We have compelled her to enlarge her elective franchise 
towards universal suffrage. Only a few years ago there 
were no cheap newspapers in England. No reform journals 
or periodicals favoring popular rights, could be started 
because there was a tax on the paper, a tax on the advertise- 
ments and a tax on each copy of the journal, so levied and 
manipulated that the tory aristocracy could kill at their 
pleasure any popular journalistic enterprise. But the 
example of free and cheap newspapers in America, under the 
guidance of a Gladstone, extinguished those taxes and from 



33 

that time dates the development of popular rights in Eng- 
land. In the same way has England been compelled to 
adopt our system of the secret ballot in place of her method 
which placed every tenant at the mercy of the landlord and 
every mill hand at the mercy of the mill owner. She is now 
struggling in a comical way to adopt our public school sys- 
tem. It remains for us to teach her to be just to the Boers. 
With the greatest esteem for your distinguished ances- 
tor and yourself, I have the honor to remain, 

Very truly yours, 

Sydney G. Fisher. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 







11 



019 920 712 A 



^ 



AaM bY tfcoroc 1) aacbanan ant 
C«mpant at tbc Si4n of tbc In 
%at in xnnn Street pbilabclpbia 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 920 712 P 



HoIIinger 

pH 8.5 

Mm Run F03.2245 



